The Charlotte Observer – Opinion
Listen closely to Liz Cheney about Republicans and the 2024 election | Opinion
Gene Nichol – December 5, 2023
Last Monday, candidate filing for the 2024 election began. On the same day, Black and Latino voters sued the state for race discrimination in the construction of the new congressional districts. Republicans said they didn’t do it. That’s what they always say. Every time.
But here is something that hasn’t always been said. Liz Cheney, the hard-right former member of Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives, said: “…the Republican Party of today has made a choice and they haven’t chosen the Constitution.” She went on to say that if they control the House in January 2025, it will present “an existential threat” to the American democracy. It “can’t happen.” Defeating them, and Donald Trump, according to Cheney, is “the cause of our time.”
Here’s how her deadly accurate claim goes.
An election denier now leads the House of Representatives. Mike Johnson, whom Cheney describes as a former friend, is “dangerous” — he was “a collaborator in the overthrow of the election.” She has “seen him take steps he knows to be wrong, steps not supported by the law, by the facts, by the Constitution to do Trump’s bidding.”
“He can’t be the speaker in 2025”, she adds. We cannot have “an election which is thrown into the House of Representatives which is governed by the Republican Party.”
Johnson and his cohort have already shown themselves to be opponents of democracy; they’ve “made their choice,” as Cheney said. It is now “easy to see” the democracy-denying steps they’ll take. We’re “numb to the truth.” We are “slow walking to dictatorship.”
Cheney adds that these Republican House members “have an extra role to play in the normalization of Trump’s attack on democracy.” They bolster and amplify it, they aren’t, as they assume, just silent aiders and abettors. You can’t “defend the Constitution and support Donald Trump, they break their oaths.” “I don’t know how they look at themselves in the mirror,” she concludes. They “vote for the destruction of democracy in the United States.”
Surely Republicans understand this. Every step in the chain is literally and irrefutably true. But maybe it’s like historian Heather Cox Richardson says, “we get so invested in our own beliefs that we don’t care what is true.” And that provides fertile ground for the breeding of totalitarianism.
I know this can, somehow, seem distant to North Carolina. Washington stuff. But the bulk of our Republican House of Representatives delegation has voted to support sedition before. And the entire N.C. Republican delegation voted to elect “a collaborator in the overthrow of (the) 2020 election” as speaker of the House. All have now formally enrolled in the shameful sedition caucus. It is surely absurd and naïve and numb to assume any will stand on democratic principle when given the opportunity to hand the American experiment over to its first dictator.
I know a lot of us, even folks who vote for them, don’t think of an array of our Republican congressmen as serious people. We’ve elected them because they were outrageous, or owned a gun shop, or because they hate transgender people, or because they say they’re holy, or, apparently, because they are buffoonish. But now we face grim and sober business. Weighty work. In our highest calling.
North Carolina cannot afford to send a single Republican member to the U.S. Congress in 2024. Our very form of government, and the blood and tears shed in the long history of its sacred name, hang in the balance. As Ulysses Grant, and, I suppose, Liz Cheney, would put it: ““There are but two parties now: traitors and patriots.”
Contributing columnist Gene Nichol is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.